Human Dignity Is Not Trending

I awoke to read this startling headline in our local newspaper: “Boulder City Protesters Lend ‘Voice for the Animal Victims.’” The actual report states that Boulder City’s former head of animal control has allegedly been “needlessly killing animals for years.” Because the city has decided not to press criminal charges, an uproar has ensued.

According to Yahoo’s search engine, in the area around Boulder City, Nevada, there are five abortion mills and two Planned Parenthood offices. How many babies have been needlessly killed in those locations? We do not know, but we see the dichotomy: It is legal to kill a preborn child, yet it is illegal to needlessly kill animals.

And therein lies the difficulty with what is trending in our culture and what is, by virtue of the subject matter, dead in the water. Reports about abortion, euthanasia, and discrimination against the disabled and the infirm simply do not gain traction because the victims are human beings.

Telling the truth about abortion and euthanasia is not politically correct.

You can get traction if you oppose the highly-disputed global warming theory because climate change is a trending topic. The height of political correctness is to agree with the fear mongers on that subject.

On the other hand, there is the real world where human beings are targeted and killed. Kurt Kondrich, father of Chloe, a beautiful little girl with Down syndrome, recently wrote a column entitled “The Real Climate Change We Need,” saying, “The most imminent threat to the existence of human beings is the climate of death poisoning society, and I pray that our broken, misguided global community will soon change to a climate of life that warmly embraces our most precious, priceless gift—human life.”

Kondrich is right. Of that there is no doubt.

We continually see stories that should gain national media attention and yet languish because they do not address what is politically correct but rather the very real threats and attacks on human dignity. For example, in Texas a gentleman by the name of David Christopher “Chris” Dunn is fighting for his life. Or rather Texas Right to Life is fighting to save him. You see Dunn,

46, a fully-conscious former peace officer, is receiving life-sustaining care. Hospital officials in Houston are fighting to stop that care.

The man, his mother, and his lawyers have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to save the man’s life. His attorney, Joe Nixon, told Breitbart Texas, “A criminal on death row in Texas has more rights than a patient in a Texas hospital.” He says a Texas statute denies a patient all due process rights and is unconstitutional.

The statute is called the Texas Advance Directives Act, and Texas Right to Life reports: “What makes the Texas Advance Directives Act even more despicable is the airtight power of the hospital to kill patients without any recourse to appeal the death sentence imposed by the hospital committee. That’s right—the final arbiter over the hospital’s fatal decision is the hospital!”

Yet Dunn’s story is not on the nightly network news. Killing the vulnerable in hospitals is not trending.

When you think about animal rights and climate change concerns compared to the carnage caused by abortion and euthanasia and other life-ending practices, it raises questions about the moral sanity of our cultural elite. You really have to wonder where society is headed when truths about human dignity are no-shows in the headlines, on the talking-head opinion programs, and elsewhere.

So let’s figure out how to get our word out, how to make what really matters in this life the trending, hot topic. That requires hard work, but we know what is at stake.

Father Shenan Boquet understands this and writes, “Love and respect for the transcendent dignity of every human being is the ultimate goal of society seeking authentic peace and social justice. Without God and the objective truth about man’s transcendent value, man destroys himself and his neighbor.”

Our challenge is to persist in unmasking the real culprits in a culture that resists truth, avoids self-sacrifice and ultimately has lost sight of the divine.

Never give up pursuing every effort to bring human dignity back into focus and trending loud and clear.